Lord Parekh: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, on arranging the debate and initiating it with authority and compassion. As he rightly pointed out, we have in this country one of the highest rates of child poverty and child abuse. No subject could be more important. The noble Lord concentrated on child poverty. After all, since he set the question, he is free to interpret it in that way. I shall concentrate on the current provision of child welfare services, and I very much hope that I will not be failed for answering my question rather than his.
	I, too, begin by congratulating the Government on some excellent work in this area. The Sure Start programme has considerable success to its credit. It involves about 400,000 children and lots of local institutions with a financial outlay of about £3 million. A couple of—or perhaps three—years ago, the Government also produced the document, Every Child Matters. In 2004, of course, we had the Children Act. All of those collectively amount to a very forceful programme of wanting to tackle child poverty.
	While thus far congratulating the Government, I want to raise four or five issues which have been of some concern to me. The first important point is that the first report of the Sure Start national evaluation team a couple of years ago concluded that the Sure Start programme has not been as successful as it could have been, but, more importantly, that it has not been particularly beneficial to disadvantaged groups.
	A similar trend, which has been researched extensively, has been found in the United States' Head Start programme, upon which our Sure Start programme is based. That research has concluded that blacks have been least able to benefit from Head Start. In our country, teenage mothers, lone parents and the unemployed have not been able to get much out of Sure Start. It might be useful to ask why that is the case.
	Rather than going into the causes of that, because the report has something interesting to say, I want briefly to allude to the ethnic minorities. Over 50 per cent of them, mainly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, earn less than half the average national income; and over 40 per cent of them, where two parents are working, receive means-tested support, compared to 8 per cent of other Britons. My question to the Minister is: is any ethnic monitoring of the Sure Start programme taking place? Who benefits from such programmes? Are the ethnic minorities benefiting from them in proportion to their presence in the population? Following that, what is the participation rate in the Sure Start programme among ethnic minority parents and children? Are we doing enough to engage their attention by, for example, producing literature in Asian languages or making sure that they know about the programme and are able to participate in it?
	My second point relates to the fact that the outcome of Sure Start and children's services is judged in terms of five criteria, including safety, good health, economic well-being and so on. The criteria are somewhat narrow and limited, because if you start at the base of society, as we do in the case of Sure Start, we should also be looking at whether children are sufficiently exposed to cultural diversity and are able to get on with people of different cultures and so on; and, equally importantly, whether parents drawn from different communities are able to work together and to build up mutual trust and understanding. In other words, one of the intended outcomes of Sure Start could be to promote social cohesion and to lay the foundations for a well balanced, multicultural society. In fact, it might also serve the purpose of a mild form of social engineering. In that case, there would be 400,000 children involved and the communities could be pushed in the direction of gender equality at the levels of parents and children.
	My third concern relates to the directors of children's services, as provided for in the 2004 Act. Directors of children's services are all very fine, but it is striking that swathes of services are not directly under their control—for example, mental health community health, schools and youth justice. The question, therefore, arises as to whether the agencies in charge of those areas would be able to do their duty by children under Section 10 of the 2004 Act. What arrangements are being made to ensure that those agencies other than directors of children's services observe their duties under Section 10?
	There is something to be said for the separation of children's and education services. But there is a danger that schools are increasingly becoming autonomous—under the Education and Inspections Bill—and the academies are being encouraged to do so. If that happens, there is bound to be a reduction in children's services and we might end up with tension between our concern for children and our concern for education and autonomy.
	My fourth anxiety relates to the tendency towards bureaucratic micro-management. We saw that in Sure Start, as was pointed out by the national evaluation team and we have seen that in other cases. Take something as simple as the new initiative on healthy food in schools, which involves 23 performance standards for schools to satisfy. Inevitably, that will lead to an enormous amount of monitoring and inspection, not to mention a large amount of money being spent on them. Why not give the money to schools, and leave it to the goodwill and good judgment of the staff and governors to provide better meals? I have a feeling that, increasingly, we are aiming at the right goals, but do not seem to have quite worked out the administrative philosophy. In the old days, we trusted the professionals and left them alone. We increasingly found that these professionals, sometimes called producers or providers—not a description I fancy for myself as a university professor—were not doing their job. Therefore, we swung to the other extreme and began to talk about the state micro-managing by setting targets, monitoring inspections and so on. We have seen that in the case of universities, research assessment exercises, hospitals and local authorities.
	We have swung from trusting the professionals to trusting the Government, and have increasingly realised that that other extreme is not producing results either. It is time for some kind of Hegelian synthesis, where the state can take an active role but, at the same time, provide enough space for professionals who are men of honour and can be trusted within certain limits to do the job. The Minister has an excellent reputation for finding a way out of complicated theoretical dilemmas of this kind. I hope that, rather than simply backtracking from state-imposed micro-management, or returning to the old system of trusting professional guilds, we might be able to find a better administrative philosophy, relevant not only to children but to other areas of life.
	There may easily be some unease about my fifth point, but I want to mention it. When we talk about the Sure Start programme, bringing parents and children together, we might engage the attention of faith communities more than we seem to. There is no reason why, for example, the churches, mosques and temples may not be asked to work together or individually, to bring children and parents together to achieve the goals we have in mind. After all, these institutions generally tend to have direct contact—the personal touch—with parents and children, and might therefore be able to deliver results in a more effective way than secular institutions could.

Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, for giving us the opportunity to debate this crucial topic. There is no doubt that he makes us all think and question our assumptions, and shakes us out of our comfort zones. That is no bad thing. It has been an excellent debate. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, I have enjoyed it. I never cease to be amazed by your Lordships' House: rapping Shakespeare is not something that I expected in today's debate, yet my noble friend Lord Lucas, in his excellent speech, was right to talk about the poverty of aspiration and the role that schools can play in opening children's eyes to the opportunities available and equipping them to seize those opportunities.
	The noble Lady, Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, is not alone in her fears and concerns on adoption and children in care. As always, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, is right to question the Government on placements and the lack of foster carers. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, is again right to point out the problems of mental health in so many of our looked-after children. The mention of overdriven working mothers by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, struck a chord, and I agreed with much that he said on parents, a subject to which I shall return.
	No one in your Lordships' House, whatever our political allegiance, will approach government policy for children with anything other than good will and the hope that it will succeed. Many will rightly and properly criticise those policies, and we on these Benches will seek alternative, more effective policies, but none will disagree with the ultimate objective of giving our children their best possible chance from the very beginning of their lives and as they grow to adulthood. The Aashas and Sufias deserve no less. These children will grow together and form the society of a new generation. We should be aware, as the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, said, that disadvantage is passed on from generation to generation, or, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, so succinctly put it, poverty is inherited, unmerited and unearned.
	The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, threw down the gauntlet to ask whether we would dismantle the mechanisms set up to tackle child poverty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, reminded us that it was Keith Joseph who first talked about breaking the cycle of deprivation. We have recently pledged our commitment to the target to reduce child poverty, and it was no idle pledge. Our policies will be based on the findings of our commissions, but whatever our policies, they must be robust and fit for purpose.
	Our children's experiences now—the nurture, love and care they receive, their practical welfare, their early and later education, the emotional and financial security of their families in all their diversity—will form the adults and, in turn, the parents of another generation. Those adults will become our nation's human wealth, the core wealth of our society. They will grow into a world where an educated population and workforce do not simply represent a social good, but a necessity for economic success and survival. Today's policies and decisions on child welfare could not be more important for their future and our country's future.
	This is a vast and complex subject. I do not think I had realised quite how vast it was until I began my research for this debate. Because it is so wide-ranging I had a dilemma about how best to tackle it in such a short debate. I decided to look at two areas where government policy, the thinking behind it and the way it is administered have a direct link on raising children out of poverty and improving their general life chances. I shall then take a quick look at other areas that may be more innovative.
	First I shall look at the Child Support Agency. We currently have 800,000 children who do not have contact with one of their parents, usually their father. Undoubtedly, children have a better chance in life if they have two parents looking out for them, offering them love and support. Sadly relations between adults break down, but, as we said many times during the course of the Adoption and Children Bill, where safety is not an issue, the best parent for a child is both parents. That is why we believe strongly in the legal presumption of co-parenting. We argued passionately for the right of both parents to have reasonable access to their children, and for their child to have reasonable access to both of them and their extended family.
	That matters for so many reasons, but particularly for two very important ones: the emotional stability provided, and financial stability. It must be right that all children should be supported by both parents. I think we can all agree that no one is happy with the way the CSA has performed the task of getting money from absent parents to the parent with care. I accept that the system was far from perfect when we were in government.
	I cannot help thinking, however, that if parents were obliged to maintain some link for the sake of their children, financial problems might not be quite so bad. In the Times on 27 January 2004 there was an interview with David Levy, the president of the United States Children's Rights Council, who was over here to discuss shared parenting. He said that its benefits were not just in fewer costly disputes in court, but in increased child support payments. Consensus Bureau statistics showed that fathers with shared parenting rights paid twice the amount of fathers with no contact. I so agreed with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on this issue.
	During a debate on this subject earlier in the year I asked the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, if Sir David Henshaw would look at this in his review of the CSA. I hope he will, and I hope he will take the findings from America very seriously. That would help children who are often financially disadvantaged when their parents go their separate ways, but what will help children in general is to ensure that their parents have proper relationship guidance. As my right honourable David Cameron said on Tuesday in a speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute:
	"When we think of family policy, we rightly focus much attention on the relationship between parent and child. But the truth is that often the best way of improving the parent child relationship is to improve the couple relationship".
	As he points out, although the state cannot deliver that, society has a strong interest in strengthening couples' relationships, something he sees being delivered by community and voluntary organisations.
	The second area I should like to focus on is Sure Start and childcare. We have consistently welcomed the support given through Sure Start to some of our most disadvantaged children and families. The Government were absolutely right to make childcare and children's services a priority. The debate is not over whether Sure Start or better, wider childcare is delivered but how to deliver it.
	During the debates on the Childcare Bill we raised concerns which echo those of Tony Blair when he said,
	"When we started Sure Start I was always a bit sceptical that in the end we could do this . . . there was an idea it would lift all boats on a rising tide. It has not worked like that".
	The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, reminded us that the first evaluation of Sure Start reported that it had not been particularly beneficial to the disadvantaged. Sure Start is starting to remind me a little of that line in the film, "Field of Dreams":
	""If we build it they will come".
	But if parents prefer to use the informal care, about which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, spoke, as we know that most of them do, or if they have to struggle through a system of complicated tax credits, they will not come. The Green Budget 2006 of the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that overpayments and complexity are intrinsic features of the system and that recent changes to cure overpayment problems have increased complexity and the costs of compliance to recipients. What is more, the full impact of the changes will not be clear until 2009. Therefore we are left with a system that does not work, where most take up is from middle income and not poor families, and where we shall not see how bad it is for three years; and by then the Government will have run out of room to change them.
	Perhaps the most serious concern I have with Sure Start is its potential to entrench immobility by locking in pockets of dependence on state provision rather than using market forces to generate service improvements. We need a great focus on improving social mobility which, according to a report in 2005 by the Sutton Trust, is falling in Great Britain.
	I do not for one minute think that the Government's heart is not in the right place but the battle to lift millions of children out of poverty will not be won with any great government schemes. It will not be won by the Government's heavy-handed top-down approach which can all too often act as a disincentive. These problems will be best tackled through locally based solutions, engaging communities and the voluntary sector and by looking after our neighbour. This is where the innovation and drive will come from. It will come from people like Camila Batmanghelidjh at Kids Company who do more to alleviate the suffering—emotional and material—of vulnerable children than abstract government agencies; and who through her work is starting to rebuild small community action where the children whom she helped are now helping others. Those are the areas that we are looking at through our commission on social justice.
	When in 1999 Tony Blair pledged to eradicate child poverty by 2020 he may even have thought that he would still be Prime Minister those 21 years later. It will be for others, and will require different policies, if that aspiration is to be met. In a powerful and thoughtful speech to the Child Poverty Action Group in June last year my honourable friend David Willetts said,
	"The government's figures show that despite all their best efforts they haven't had much success in tackling the problems of persistent poverty. It is a problem of successive governments. It is relatively easy to spend a lot of money to boost the income of the poorest people. But it is much harder to open up British Society so that people genuinely feel that it is open, meritocratic and mobile".
	That is the challenge we all face.